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The official Score It MagazineWed, 14 Mar 2018 18:02:46 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.5https://i2.wp.com/magazine.scoreit.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/cropped-SCORE-IT_LOGO-noir.png?fit=32%2C32Score It Magazinehttp://magazine.scoreit.org
3232124452778Score Picks from Heather Christianhttp://magazine.scoreit.org/score-picks-heather-christian/
http://magazine.scoreit.org/score-picks-heather-christian/#respondWed, 14 Mar 2018 18:02:46 +0000http://magazine.scoreit.org/?p=1776We have asked our interviewees to select five tracks from various scores that they think are interesting, forward-thinking or even underrated. There are no limits to which tracks our interviewees can choose; the aim is to give you, readers, a real glimpse into the composer’s tastes and musical identity. Last week, composer Heather Christian talked to Score It about her brilliant work on Lemon, […]

]]>We have asked our interviewees to select five tracks from various scores that they think are interesting, forward-thinking or even underrated. There are no limits to which tracks our interviewees can choose; the aim is to give you, readers, a real glimpse into the composer’s tastes and musical identity.

Last week, composer Heather Christian talked to Score It about her brilliant work on Lemon, a bizarre and reckless independent satire directed by Janicza Bravo. We absolutely loved her beautiful yet crazy score and it is with great plasure that today, we share with you five pieces from her favourite score – which actually turned out to be four, but who needs quantity when you have quality? Heather’s Score Picks are actually like her music: sensitive, timeless and deliciously enjoyable without moderation.

Truth be told, this particular track is an augmentation of an existing piece by Harry Nilsson that Brion spun into the web of his score. This particular track for me is the magic cherry on top of the score, but to really get why it’s so brilliant- you have to listen to the rest of the film score.

Its a shard of a song that we can only assume is batting about in our protagonists memory that gets exquisitely framed by a sonic language Brion has spent the previous hour of the movie establishing. In my brain, the parlor organ is shorthand for second chances at paths untaken, the bells and harps are the paradise that stays just out of frame. All these emotional signifiers come together to sing along with this song. It feels like the emotional life of the whole movie is rushing forward to take off on the wings of a weird Pegasus.

The randomness/perfection of the particular song framed (which is from the movie musical Popeye) is an added bonus. It ends up feeling like when some random and perfect song gets lodged in your head at deafening volume when youre doing something you are are slightly afraid of. There’s no real reason for it to be the perfect song to recall, (in our lives, or in this movie) but it is.

This score is simultaneously completely inseparable from its film and splendidly autonomous without it. The score is its own animal, as saturate as the color green and just as indelible to the experience of watching it. It’s a brilliant circus of over saturation (a saturation of emotional intensity in the melody itself, not one of orchestration) and I’m in love with it. It doesn’t emotionally manipulate us in regard to the plot or tell us what’s coming before it happens, it paints the movie in front of us as it’s happening at one second per second.

This might be another cheat, since this is a Mozart piece Nicholas Britell subsumes into his score, but, again, the rest of the score around it is a payoff and holds this moment at its peak. This pairing is one of my favorites of all time. When I saw Moonlight in the theater, the soccer scene came on, this piece happened, and I started breathing differently. I think I love this because this is an example of score-as-lens. The score gives you a lens you didn’t totally expect to have. It is in dialogue WITH the film, actively, not always in parallel lines with it. The score starts this epic lens dialogue here with this moment and doesn’t stop. It’s never a well-made bed that seems overtly correlative. It has its own ideas about things. I really love this kind of complexity.

It smashes the container of the movie into smithereens at the same time as it unites all the disparate threads of the plot with one ridiculously well made pop song. It’s just damn good writing. It’s a sacrilege of convention in all the right ways. If you have never seen this scene and have no idea what I’m talking about, go watch— I promise the payoff for score nerds is indeed significant.

]]>http://magazine.scoreit.org/score-picks-heather-christian/feed/01776Pulling up with a Lemon – Heather Christian Talks Scoring Independent Curiosity Lemonhttp://magazine.scoreit.org/pulling-lemon-heather-christian-talks-scoring-independent-curiosity-lemon/
http://magazine.scoreit.org/pulling-lemon-heather-christian-talks-scoring-independent-curiosity-lemon/#respondThu, 08 Mar 2018 17:26:50 +0000http://magazine.scoreit.org/?p=1771The relationship between Janicza Bravo and Heather Christian has been, in Christian’s own words, a “life-long love affair” that started long before Bravo directed her first short films. So when the Los Angeles director gave her fetish composer Lemon, not only did she turn it into lemonade, but she managed to quench the thirst for […]

]]>The relationship between Janicza Bravo and Heather Christian has been, in Christian’s own words, a “life-long love affair” that started long before Bravo directed her first short films. So when the Los Angeles director gave her fetish composer Lemon, not only did she turn it into lemonade, but she managed to quench the thirst for eccentricity for anyone curious enough to listen to it. Christian, besides being a multitalented musician and composer, is very busy as well, so much that we came to believe that either she has a doppelgänger, or she used a time-freezing power to talk to us. Anyway, the Lemon composer deserves a much wider recognition than what she actually gets for her numerous projects: she is the singer/songwriter in the band Heather Christian & the Arbonauts, wrote and composed music for many off-Broadway stage plays – she recently created her own one-woman musical called Animal Wisdom, which played for two months in Brooklyn and received great reviews – and, of course, writes music for film. Lemon marks the first time the New York composer scores a feature-length film – the first feature director by her longtime friend Janicza Bravo – and talked to Score It Magazine about her compositions.

A genuine cinematic curiosity, Lemon is a surreal and absurd tale of mid-life crisis which follows the unraveling life of stage director Isaac (Brett Gelman), who is left by his girlfriend of ten years (Judy Greer). Heather Christian wrote, produced and arranged all the tracks from the soundtrack album which is odd, pretty much like the film, and includes, among other unexpected tunes, a grand oratorio beautifully sung by choir voices which is the core of the film’s musical dimension.

How did you meet Janicza Bravo and how did you end up composing music for her films?

Janicza and I met in college, where we went to the same theatre program and she was a theatre director. She was sort of famous for doing these highly stylized productions that were absolutely gorgeous. I started as an actor in some of her plays, then she decided to add music to a production of Romeo and Juliet that she was doing in a church in Downtown New York and she was like, “I need a composer, so why don’t you write something?” I had never composed anything at the time… I mean, I’ve been a musician for forever, but I had never written for theatre. So I said, “Okay, I’ll try!” I wrote a score for voice and typewriter, and I played the apothecary in this production. (laughs) Later, she moved to Los Angeles and decided that film was where she really wanted to focus her attention, and she gave me a similar phonecall, which was basically, “Hi, I need a composer” and I was like, “Great, I don’t know what I’m doing.” That’s how we made our first film together, and through that process, I thought, “Oh, I might actually have something to say here.” We both have a theatrical approach to film work that I think is different, but we’ve been in a life-long love affair, Janicza and I, so in any film that she decides to undertake, I usually end up doing the score.

Lemon, even though it is a small-budget independent film, is a bigger production than Janicza’s short films. Did you two worked as close as you did on her previous films?

Well, because she is on the West Coast and I live on the East Coast, most of our work is done long distance, so my relationship with Janicza is on the phone or via Skype during the entirety of the process. I only met her crew once, I was on the set for one day, and I didn’t meet her editor until after we were done with the film. It’s mostly Janicza that I’m just talking to, so I feel like I have a very insular relationship with her, which is so wonderful! As a result, the score feels like it is entirely her voice.

What directions did she give you for the score?

I went in three directions. First, I wrote this vocal oratorio based on Chekhov’s The Seagull, which is the play that Isaac, Brett Gelman’s character, teaches to his class in a terrible production. Then, I did this sort of deconstructed vaudeville score for solo instruments, and finally, I made this bad radio station that could play in Isaac’s nightmares, which was all songs that could be from a very specific artist, but all of the lyrics were taken from Victorian poems about birds. So, I sent Janicza these three directions, expecting her to pick one, and she said, “We’re gonna do all three!” We approached the score in a theatrical way, because she split the movie up in acts, like you would do with a theatre play. In the short films that we do, she would sometimes come up to me with a seed idea, like, “I think this is all flute music” or, “I think this is heavy metal.” In the case of Lemon, she said, “I do think there’s a large orchestral piece, but I just want you to do what you want to do on this one.” It was totally liberating.

The three ideas you mentioned before – the oratorio, this piano/clarinet duet which has this silent film music flavor and the indie pop song – are basically three themes that are far from traditional film scoring. How did you come up with these?

As a composer, I’m not good at straight up underscore. I’m always looking for something that I can be in dialogue with. I feel, especially in Janicza’s work, like there’s so much visual content: she’s so meticulous about frame, and about colour palette, and everything in that room has been styled, and every single shot… There is no real missing information, we’re getting everything, so I wanted to make a score that was autonomous, or music that was in dialogue with Isaac. In order to do that, I can’t just write what I think feels like this, so I do a thinking exercise. The first thing I knew I wanted to do was the vocal oratorio for The Seagull. That was more of a wouldn’t-that-be-cool! idea, actually. (laughs) I wondered if that would be too much, but too much is absolutely enough in this case. The emotional trajectory of the film mimics the emotional trajectory of The Seagull; the movie is actually pretty Chekhovian, in that it is like a glorification of mundane crises. Thematically, it made sense, but I had no idea how it would work in the film. Then, Janicza was actually the one who said, “I need something that is a little more light,” and that’s how I came up with the vaudeville piece, which was quite a lot of fun. I love diegetic… Well, I love diegetic anything in films. What diegetic score is, first, like what underscore is, but by breaking the reality just a little bit. So, the radio station, because Isaac spends so much time in his car, felt like a good way to do that.

The relationship between the film and the play within the film has a weirdness to it in which music plays a large role. Though I saw Lemon as something mainly satirical, your music reaches out for much more abstract and intimate feelings such as sadness, loneliness, but also grace, all of which are emphazised in a grand way. How did you work on this in the composing process?

What I like to do is oversaturate. I like to make what I call “suites,” and for Lemon we ended up using something like 170 cues… Usually, what I do is make a lot. I have a singular relationship with Janicza in which she never uses a temp score, I never feel like I’m having to replace anything so I start writing very early in the process and I send her all of these libraries that she can use as a temp, and then we solidify which of these demos are working for her. So I take those and Frankenstein them – I mean, I call musicians, we make them what they should be in order to turn them into bona fide pieces of music and not just thoughts or ideas. It’s very much a back-and-forth process, I send her a lot of stems and I trust her and, implicitly, her editor, to place things.

What you have composed for Janicza Bravo’s films is very different each time, and it led me into thinking that she gives you a lot of freedom and that it is you, as a composer, who is just willing to explore this musical genre or that one.

Well, I am sort of a musical omnivore. I grew up classically-trained in piano but I sang in blues clubs, and there’s a lot of stuff in between these two, so I just made it my job to consume everything. Where my inspiration lies is trying something that I don’t know how to do. In Man Rots from the Head… I, by no means, am a jazz music expert. However, as an idiot approaching jazz, I do feel that the score has a certain commentary about it; if it was totally 100% within its own genre, I don’t think it would have a point of view. It’s this musical education process that I’m going through while I’m attempting to execute – or whatever it is that I’m doing – that lends a sort of fucked up comedic air that works well with Janicza’s aesthetics, in that she’s always an outsider, and the viewer is always an outsider, and the protagonists are always outsiders. So I think that’s more serendipity that those things are laying, specifically with Janicza’s films, but the inspiration is usually in the seed of “How do I do this?” like, “How do I write a score entirely for the flute?” or “How do I do heavy metal?” No idea how to do heavy metal! What’s the deal with heavy metal? So you usually do the research of why it’s valuable to come up with, but people attach themselves to specific genres of music and all of that becomes part of the thinking exercise.

It sounds like you need challenges.

I do! Music is an abstract art form, you know. I feel like the majority of generation, for me, is in process. It’s tricking my brain into thinking that I’m doing something very specific because otherwise, the possibilities are endless. So I just have to make a decision right off the bat that this is the approach that I’m going to take, these are the parameters that I’m going to set, and then just go into it. And usually, what I end up with is something completely different, but the parameters are where most of the contact comes from, at least in this generation phase.

When one has so many different projects such as you do, how important is it to have an entourage? I mean, do you work regularly with the same musicians, no matter what the project is?

Well, yes and no. If I have a longer timeline, I really do try to make the effort to meet different musicians and work with them if I’m sure that it is going to work. But I’ve got people in my Rolodex who will remain there for life; my guitarist Sasha Brown and I have been together for over ten years, and he’s always the first phone call that I make; my score mixer and record producer Brian Bender is someone with who I will probably work with for the rest of my life. Just because there’s an easy report in these two very important areas, it gives me more freedom to pick from a wider pool of musicians that I’ve not necessarily worked with before; I know that with Sasha, somebody is going to get an arrangement and add exactly the right flavour that I wanted to the mix, and I know that I’m going to pass it off to a mixer and producer that knows exactly what I’m going for, so I don’t have to worry about those things. I think it’s important to work outside your circle, absolutely, but… You’re not dealing with a musician who’s just going to play your part, you work with someone who has an entirely different perspective, which I love and encourage because it does interesting things to my brain and takes me to the next step, so I’m constantly trying to find people who are smarter than me.

What directions did you take in choosing the instruments?

It was sort of a grab bag. Lemon was made on a shoestring budget, so I had to fake an orchestra. I knew that I needed these giant choral pieces and I knew that I was going to need instruments that I couldn’t fake. There’s a lot of instruments that I can fake, but I can’t fake a French horn, I can’t fake a bassoon, I can’t fake a clarinet. So it really became about who; it was less about the timbre of the instrument and more about the instrument that I was going to call over to my studio and spend twenty-four hours with. The first who I had identified was Patrick Breiner, who is primarily a saxophone player; he brought in everything that he could play, and we ended up using some clarinet. I just took everything and I figured out where to go from there, the way that the instruments get personified for me in different ways and different contexts. Then, I figured the counter to that, the aspect of Isaac’s personality, that was not in the score yet, and it was this element of cheesy pomposity. And I was like, “Well, what’s cheesier and more pompous than a French horn?” (laughs) So, I called Matt Marks, who is a friend of my husband, to come over and do some French horn for me. I feel that it’s those two elements that really shaped where everything else went. About the choral stuff, the first thing I identified was a choral writer, so all the choral things sort of have their own identity. It’s hard for me not to use my voice as a choral writer – there’s quite a lot to say in that regard – so I just started fooling around with strings. I can play key things, so pipe organ felt like too much, and in this case again, too much was just enough. I tried a lot of directions before I solidified exactly where we were going, but a lot of it started with Patrick being exactly the right voice.

Is there something that you still have not experienced in music and that you want to try? Or maybe some future projects in film scoring?

You mean “nothing that I can talk about?” (laughs) Yeah, I’ve got several projects that are currently and unbelievably all in the contract phase right now, but soon, some of these things will become visible. I’m very excited about them, and I hope to be able to talk about them very soon. But honestly, I’d love to try to make a hip hop record! (laughs) That’s not something that I’ve tried before. I love form, I guess it’s part of my OCD… Recently, I wrote a requiem mass for a show I was doing, and, you know, the form is so ancient that you just have to trust it. All of the notes and where they’re supposed to go emotionally are already figured out. Classical form is something that I’m pretty much still investigating and in which I’m interested, in terms of what it does to my brain when I’m writing something. I’d love to write a suite – whatever that means for a musician like me! Eventually, I’d love to write a sonata for piano, even though I would never want my music to feel like it is rooted in one thing, entirely. Especially if I’m approaching things classically, I don’t ever want them to feel stodgy, I don’t want them to feel like you know you’re listening to classical music. I always want to be on the cusp of, you know, “How am I supposed to be listening to this?” There’s information like: how we feel in a rock club versus how we feel in Carnegie Hall… Well, I feel like I’m constantly trying to find the seat in between those two seats.

]]>http://magazine.scoreit.org/pulling-lemon-heather-christian-talks-scoring-independent-curiosity-lemon/feed/01771‘Get Out’ Composer Michael Abels – A Portraithttp://magazine.scoreit.org/get-composer-michael-abels-portrait/
http://magazine.scoreit.org/get-composer-michael-abels-portrait/#respondThu, 22 Feb 2018 17:10:56 +0000http://magazine.scoreit.org/?p=1762On February 18th, 2018, Michael Abels received the Composer of the Year Award at an event produced by MusicUNTOLD, an organization dedicated to representing programs that promote diversity and human dignity, with a focus on African-American composers. The award has been presented to the Get Out composer at the Michelle Obama Neighborhood Library in Long […]

]]>On February 18th, 2018, Michael Abels received the Composer of the Year Award at an event produced by MusicUNTOLD, an organization dedicated to representing programs that promote diversity and human dignity, with a focus on African-American composers. The award has been presented to the Get Out composer at the Michelle Obama Neighborhood Library in Long Beach, California. Get Out is the first film score ever written by Abels after a life-long career in music composing. While the film is nominated four times at the 2018 Oscars, today Score It Magazine focuses on this extremely talented composer.

Michael Abels at a Get Out screening in Los Angeles (Photo by Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic)

When Jordan Peele hired Michael Abels before he began shooting Get Out in 2016, the American composer – who was 53 at the time – had never written music for a film. Peele discovered him through YouTube with the video of a live performance of his concerto Urban Legends, and knew from this moment that Abels would be the perfect match for the Get Out soundtrack. The composer, practically unknown at the time when Get Out was released, dedicated most of his life to writing music. Having started composing music at the age of eight, Michael Abels has created over forty orchestral and choral works up to this day.

Born in 1962 in Phoenix, Arizona and raised in South Dakota, Michael Abels attended the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, where he was introduced to film scoring and started composing music for student films. But Abels quickly became more of a stage composer, creating colourful orchestral pieces for concert halls. He draws his inspirations mainly from ethnic music and African-American music – jazz, soul, gospel, blues – and adapts these popular genres in order to create his unique symphonic sound. His best-known piece, Global Warming, was created in 1991 for the Phoenix Youth Symphony and blends traditional Irish music with Middle-Eastern tones. Composed at the end of the Cold War, after the Berlin Wall came down, Global Warming is a celebration of divergent cultures through their own folk music, and was one of the first works from an African-American composer to be performed by the National Symphony of South Africa after the election of Nelson Mandela. The same year, he composed two other pieces for gospel soloists, I’m Determined and Walk With Me.

Michael Abels has created several works for the Harlem Quartet, such as Urban Legends (2009) and Delights and Dances (2012). He also depicted the unified spirit of the country in the aftermath of 9/11 in the short orchestral piece Tribute, which was the first work performed by the National Symphony Orchestra after the World Trade Center attacks. In 1997, he composed the 13-minute orchestral piece Dance for Martin’s Dream, a powerful and personal celebration of Martin Luther King’s message of hope from his 1963 Lincoln Memorial speech and his legacy. The Los Angeles Opera also commissioned an opera from Abels called Homies & Popz (2000), about how Los Angeles homeless activist Ted Hayes created a cricket team in Compton in order to prevent the neighborhood youth from poverty, homelessness and gang culture. Abels has often been commissioned to compose his works, but his music lives through the political messages he introduces.

The vision Jordan Peele had for his film was very clear, and he knew from the start Abels would make a great job. He composed this Bernard Herrmann-like soundtrack, which at times is reminiscent of some of the most thrilling films by Alfred Hitchcock or Brian De Palma. The African-American legacy is also an important part of the score and should not be overlooked. Voices are heard in some of the pieces throughout the film, chanting and whispering phrases in Swahili like “Run” or “Save yourself” in a rather frightening vibe; the main title, “Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga”, can be translated by “Listen to your ancestors”. The whole score displays a message that reinforces the message that Jordan Peele put into the film’s script and somehow makes sense even when the score is played alone. Just like Peele did in the film, Abels’s score tells the story from the main character’s point of view, justifying the use of a music heavily rooted in African-American culture, but performed with unsettling undertones. After he composed the score for Get Out, Abels continued to spread his message when he wrote additional music for Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, which is set during the 1967 Detroit riots.

Although Get Out earned four important Oscar nominations – Best Film, Best Director (Jordan Peele), Best Actor in a Leading Role (Daniel Kaluuya), Best Original Screenplay (Jordan Peele) – Michael Abels is sadly missing from the nominees shortlist for Best Original Score. Peele recently said he was already planning to work with Abels again on a future film project, and we will not miss his further works.

]]>http://magazine.scoreit.org/get-composer-michael-abels-portrait/feed/01762High Stakes On Ice Skates – An Interview With “I, Tonya” Composer Peter Nashelhttp://magazine.scoreit.org/high-stakes-ice-skates-interview-tonya-composer-peter-nashel/
http://magazine.scoreit.org/high-stakes-ice-skates-interview-tonya-composer-peter-nashel/#respondWed, 14 Feb 2018 19:22:29 +0000http://magazine.scoreit.org/?p=1756Peter Nashel truly is a hidden gem among film composers today. Initially a composer in the world of advertising, later on TV where he scored many documentaries, Nashel founded Duotone Audio Group with fellow composer Jack Livesey in 1996, a few years before he came to film scoring with rare but remarkable works. Recently scoring […]

]]>Peter Nashel truly is a hidden gem among film composers today. Initially a composer in the world of advertising, later on TV where he scored many documentaries, Nashel founded Duotone Audio Group with fellow composer Jack Livesey in 1996, a few years before he came to film scoring with rare but remarkable works. Recently scoring the Netflix series Marco Polo, he talks today to Score It about his score for three-time Oscar-nominated I, Tonya, starring Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding.

I, Tonya tells the story of the (in)famous figure skater and the events surrounding the attack of Nancy Kerrigan shortly before the 1994 Olympics, in which Harding was involved. Most of the soundtrack is composed of licensed songs, giving excessive energy to the film in the style of Martin Scorsese’s gangster epics. Peter Nashel composed three stressful, dramatic themes which give a haunting dimension to the characters’ actions and the inherent consequences.

Firstly, can you tell me a bit about your background and how you became a film composer?

Actually, I started as a classical saxophone player. I grew up doing this, and when I went to high school and college I started to really get into jazz. So I went from being a jazz musician coming to New York after school and playing around town to doing lots of different plays in lots of different ensembles… Then I got hired to play on a commercial. And you know, at that point, in New York City, making commercials meant… Well, they were really just all jingles, original music that was brand-specific. So this notion that an artist or a group or anybody would ever have their music in an ad was completely foreign at the time. Not only was it foreign, but it had a name: it was called “selling out”. And you would never sell out, like sell soap with your music, that’s ridiculous. So when I met these guys and I played at a session for them, I was really taken with how creative what they were doing was. They weren’t doing standard commercial work, they were doing really cutting-edge stuff like sound collage and very contemporary music. It literally was like an epiphany, I fell in love with it right away. I played them some music that I was working on and they invited me to work with them, so I started to write music for commercials! That was the big turning point for me, because it was my first introduction of music to picture, and it got me thinking. It really started opening up my eyes, as well as my ears, because up until that point, I was a very jazz-centered musician and heard everything through the lens of jazz, which is, if you know jazz aficionados or if you are one yourself, a very high art form. You tend to be very isolated in that world. So, doing my first job for a commercial opened me to a completely new way of doing things, so I continued to do it for several years. Then, an old friend of mine from school was part of this film production company and he invited me to take a look at a cut of a film he was working on, and that was my first feature project, which was The Deep End. That was a big experience for me, and I started to go much more deeply into music for film, music for TV and everything related to that.

You have mostly done music for documentaries and TV projects, so how did you get involved in the production of I, Tonya?

It was through Sue Jacobs, an old friend of mine who was the film’s music supervisor. She called me and said ‘Would you have any interest or any time to take a look at a cut of the film that I’m working on?’ I said ‘Sure,’ and even at the stage when I saw it, you could tell it would be an absolutely incredible movie. I definitely wanted to be a part of it, and that led to conversations with Craig Gillespie, the director. It’s interesting that you mentioned TV and documentaries, because I used to have a manager who said that there’s a curtain that exists between doing music for commercials, doing music for TV and doing music for films. For some people, it’s an iron curtain: they don’t ever go between those disciplines, but for some others, it’s a velvet curtain and they feel free to walk through, and that’s something you see much more now. TV has evolved so much over the last ten years: now it has movie stars, big directors, big writers, and all those people who follow them to these premium TV and streaming projects because, you know, it’s basically a ten-hour feature film. I don’t really see a distinction between the music I’ve done for TV and what I’ve composed for feature films. For me, doing a feature is just part of the normal diet of the musical projects that I’d end up working on.

Would you say that this idea of an iron curtain comes essentially from the world of film? I mean, things are not so different even in Europe, except maybe in the UK or in Italy, but a French film composer would never do music for TV, much less for commercials.

I think it’s more of an artistic mind set. You go where the projects are, where interesting people are working, where interesting projects are created. In the United States, if you’re a big film composer in Hollywood, you typically don’t work on TV, and if you’re a successful TV composer, you don’t work on ads. But that has changed a great deal, now you can see David Fincher doing House of Cards or Mindhunter… Jason Bateman can be on a feature film and on a great TV show like Ozark. The frontiers are much less rigid than they were previously in the US, and I think that brings a change in the art form. For a long period of time before streaming, there was a very specific type of TV entertainment: you had procedural dramas that went week by week. Now, you have that serial type of programming, where you need to start at the beginning and go all the way to the end, and I think it started first in cable with HBO and AMC, and changed them forever… You know, AMC used to be the channel that would do plenty of reruns, like The Godfather saga, James Bond weekends, and all of sudden, Mad Men came and completely changed AMC and now it’s a bona fide powerhouse in the TV industry. Cable in general has become a powerhouse: FX, Syfy, HBO… Their content is incredible. And when streaming services became involved out of necessity, they started to create their own original programs and they had a ton of money. When you work on a project like Marco Polo, honestly, you can’t believe what you’re looking at: they’ve got the best cinematographers in the world, the best costumers, fantastic storylines, amazing actors… This is not a small production, this is giant! It would otherwise have been a feature film, but you’re not seeing it at a cinema, you experience it at home on your own TV set.

Breaking Bad composer Dave Porter, whom we interviewed a few weeks ago for his first score for a feature film, basically said the same things as you are telling me now, and I think it’s fantastic to hear professionals saying, ‘I can do my job differently and I want to experience it, I want to be a part of this change.’

Absolutely! You know, in a sense, a TV advertisement is like a haiku and a television show is a novel that can go on for ten hours, five seasons, seven seasons, eighty hours, a hundred hours… It’s an epic. And a movie – well, that depends on which ones you’re talking about, though – is a bit more like a magazine article. And that’s more the way that people are experiencing it now. There are friends of mine with whom I complain that there’s too much good TV and too many things to watch! It’s like, ‘Oh, you have to watch this, it’s incredible!’ and ‘You have to watch that,’ but you can’t keep up with everything because there are so many things. And frankly, that didn’t even hurt films at all! Look at the crop of films that were out last year or the ones nominated for awards this year, whether it’s Call Me By Your Name or Phantom Thread, I, Tonya for sure, The Florida Project, Lady Bird… This is high art, and it used to be the sole domain of it, but now it has expanded to TV, and when you hear people talk about TV series now, they’re doing it in the same way that they talk about films.

Let’s talk about I, Tonya. How much time did you have to write and compose the score, as you arrived on this production quite late?

Generously, I would say I had about three and a half weeks. Now, in all fairness, there isn’t fifty minutes of score in the film. The score picks up maybe halfway or two-thirds of the way through the film and ends up being kind of a melodramatic character that heightens the actions surrounding the incident. It went very fast because they were trying to get the film ready for the Toronto International Film Festival, which is happening in September, and it was the summer. It was a very quick process that was unusual for me because I didn’t go about it in the way that I would normally go about any of my projects. After I spoke to Craig and after we agreed on what would be the role of the music and how I saw the score playing best in the film, it immediately was just me writing in my studio. And I will give one plug to music for TV and music for advertising: the turnarounds are insane for anyone who’s really worked on these kinds of projects. You know, with Marco Polo, sometimes there were up to thirty-four or forty minutes of music in a one-hour episode, and we – my co-composer and I – didn’t get any more time to do that: we would get a cut, write for four days, submit a preview of the score, we would address concerns, we would have it mixed, and then, we would start over for the next episode. So, you know, your ideas come as much from inspiration as it is about how you’re good at your craft, and I, Tonya was definitely a part of that. With I, Tonya, there wasn’t time for second-guessing: once I’ve figured out what I was going for, I started to write cues, sent them, got feedbacks, and all of that happened very quickly.

How close did you work with director Craig Gillespie?

Very, very close. Craig, Sue Jacobs, editor Tatiana Riegel – who is actually nominated for an Oscar, which is very exciting – and I would sit in a room every couple of days and I would play them cues. Then Craig was off for a while, he went back to Australia where he was shooting another project, so I would send him links to share things and talk about it on the phone. Everything was fully mocked up in my studio for people to see it, hear it and feel it.

Margot Robbie provides Tonya’s moves with something extremely interesting: she can incarnate pure feminine elegance when she’s on the ice, but hints at a whole range of masculine moves in her private life, and this is something that is reflected in the music. Did you take any inspiration from Margot’s performance?

It came much more naturally than that. I wished that I had a master plan so I’d know all along how it would be, but the film has three main elements that are so topical in our world and particularly in the United States now: gender – how men and women treat each other and how women get treated in general – class – high class, low class, red states, blue states… You know, Nancy Kerrigan was a blue-blooded woman from Massachusetts, and Tonya didn’t come from that background. And this story is also a reflection on the whole nature of truth, and that’s something we’re dealing with right now in the US: what is true and what is fake? The film did a great job of creating kind of a Rashomon effect: you have Jeff’s story and you have Tonya’s story, and maybe this isn’t 100% true, maybe it is something they only told themselves or that they took away from the experience. Interestingly, at the time, I actually thought Tonya Harding was the one who attacked Nancy Kerrigan, I never even knew about these other characters. So what I did was writing according to my reaction to the film. To me, it was a very dark comedy: you laugh, but you don’t necessarily laugh at the characters, you laugh with them, except maybe for the character of Shawn Eckhart…

In the case of Shawn, I think you laugh more at the situation he got himself into and how he’s struggling in a most stupid way to get out of it.

Yeah, that’s exactly right. But you know, what I tried to combine musically was to have elements of minimalist music that I think worked perfectly well with her moves on the ice, and inject them this very high drama, the high stakes of it all. Bernard Hermann or Jerry Goldsmith, that’s drama: it was over the top with what was happening.

The film is unexpectedly complex because everything in it relies on contradiction and dualities. What you achieved with your score is adding to these dualities by composing something that is kind of obsessive but not intrusive.

Oh, I’m gonna use that phrase, can I keep it? (laughs)

If you do, please put in on the album’s cover! So how did you create this style, and how did you choose which instruments you were going to use?

I knew that I wanted an element of grace and precision, and almost a feeling of floating or flying between the piano and the strings. And I also wanted to combine that with this whole lot of crazy metallic percussion instruments. You know, given the speed with which everything was happening, the score came together very intuitively. Ultimately, what I settled out was a very small string section which at times is doubled, and at one point I had them not playing necessarily together but almost at battle, the way Nancy and Tonya would be battling. So sometimes, they were synchronized and sometimes they were working independently from each other. There’s definitely a lot of colours with many bowed instruments: bowed glass, bowed vibraphones… The woodwinds also help create this haunting texture. And you know, it’s one of the things that happen when you talk about the marriage between the music and the image: it feels right. It’s animating the right part of the film, and I think this is the real role of composers. At the end of the day, you have to start with one simple question: why does this scene need music? In other words, what can I bring with the music that isn’t already there for a viewer to feel and understand? And when you’ve answered that question, a lot of the score follows naturally from it. A great thing about film music is, it doesn’t have to be in a particular style. I tend to be free from any genre, I tend to choose between different genres in a funny way, and I think it comes up with a much more interesting effect, at the end of the day.

The score also has odd sounds used as motifs like this frantic ticking clock, haunting gimmicks and motifs that defuse the Tonya who’s glorified in the 1st half of the film. And it reminded me of a musical movement that is very “New York”, which is of course minimalism. How important are motifs in your music?

You know, the notion of a theme in film music has evolved a great deal over the last fifty years. A theme used to strictly be a melody, whether it’s a song or a piece of music… John Williams in The Long Goodbye uses the same piece of music over and over with different arrangements, and you can clearly identify this as the theme of the film. I don’t think this would ever go out of fashion, because there’s always a very satisfying place for that in certain types of films. But there’s an alternate language that has appeared… If you take for instance The Social Network, you might not be able to hum the melody as you would do for the theme from The Long Goodbye, but there’s a feel to it that we’re getting from that music. Sometimes it’s a simple chord motif that gets used over and over again, and it’s not even so much of a melody per se but it’s a harmonic progression. And the same thing goes with rhythm: sometimes, people will rely on a rhythmic motif. I think it’s very film-dependent: you’ll have to determine what are going to be the elements that people will hear to establish that consistency in the score. That was definitely something I played with because I, Tonya has so many licensed songs, and so the score had to play this very specific role and be cohesive within that timeframe. There wasn’t so much time needed to come up with a melody, but I think you do walk away from that, and when you listen to the ‘Tonya Suite’ or ‘The Incident’, you’re like, ‘Oh, this is the score I’m hearing,’ because it still holds together as a theme. I think this is part of how themes have evolved over the years. And some filmmakers don’t want themes at all, you know. Michael Mann, for instance… There are pieces of music in his films that work for scenes and then, that’s it! It’s very different from how Steven Spielberg and John Williams work together. You can hear that with Alexandre Desplat, who is one of my favourite film composers today: he has had many very interesting types of scores, some of them thematically heavy from a melodic point of view, some from a harmonic point of view and some from a textural point of view. You know, Syriana is mostly textural to me… The Beat That My Heart Skipped has an eerie score and there’s not necessarily a ton of music, but the way it’s working in the film is so effective, and it’s not traditional film scoring!

Did you work with music supervisor Susan Jacobs in choosing the songs? How did you manage to find and create your own musical space among this myriad of licensed music?

In a sense, the songs operate as the score for I, Tonya as well as the actual score. When I saw the film, there were already a lot of songs, and I thought some of them were out of the league of this film regarding the budget or the artist signoff. This is where the skill and the genius of Sue came in: she was able to reach out to unbelievably huge artists and show them the film and how their music would be used, whether it’s Mark Knopfler or Fleetwood Mac. Sue really was the one that engineered that full part of the film. It didn’t affect me with the score, I think there’s always been some scenes that wouldn’t work with another song and so they needed score. So it was clear which parts of the film I was going to work on and which parts she was going to work on. The first cut that I saw had a whole ton of songs being used, and it was really up to her to get the rights to use them. And she succeeded.

]]>http://magazine.scoreit.org/high-stakes-ice-skates-interview-tonya-composer-peter-nashel/feed/01756Going Western – Carter Burwell On Scoring “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”http://magazine.scoreit.org/going-western-carter-burwell-scoring-three-billboards-outside-ebbing-missouri/
http://magazine.scoreit.org/going-western-carter-burwell-scoring-three-billboards-outside-ebbing-missouri/#respondFri, 09 Feb 2018 18:17:06 +0000http://magazine.scoreit.org/?p=1737Previously this week, Score It gave you a glimpse inside Carter Burwell’s rich and incredible career. Today, the New York-based artist, who scored so many awarded and world-acclaimed films such as Fargo, Being John Malkovich, Three Kings, Where the Wild Things Are and Carol talks to Score It about his wonderful recent work for Martin […]

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is the third film from Martin McDonagh, with whom Carter Burwell regularly collaborates since his 2008 film In Bruges. In this darkly comedic drama, a mother (Frances McDormand) goes to war with the local police months after the murder of her daughter, as the investigation has remained at a standstill. When she displays a controversial message directed at the beloved local sheriff (Woody Harrelson) on the town’s billboards, the battle gets more intense.

Score It Magazine: I’ve read that Martin McDonagh sent you the film’s screenplay before shooting. What ideas did you draw from it? How do you work on a musical composition from words?

Carter Burwell:That’s true, Martin sent me the script before the shooting. I drew several ideas from it, but I couldn’t figure out a concept that would drive me in a certain direction. I started with an approach that comes from Spaghetti Westerns, which was to compose a theme for each of the main characters. Unfortunately, it didn’t work because of the characters’ importance in the script – for instance, Dixon (played by Sam Rockwell) becomes an important character late in the film. So I decided to go in another direction but keeping the Western approach. Ultimately, when I saw the finished film, I decided to focus on Mildred, as Frances McDormand’s character is the centre of the film, and I composed the themes from a perspective that would be close to her.

I listened to the album one month before seeing the film. Actually, I expected the film to be much darker since you emphasized so beautifully its dramatic side. How did you work on themes that are present in the film such as revenge, rape, death, racism?

As those themes were present in the film, they somehow had to be in the score. The only way to be true with these themes, and the way they are dealt with in the film, was not to translate these in music from my point of view, but from Mildred’s. It is what drives Mildred’s actions, and I couldn’t imagine another way of putting it in my music.

The score focuses on Mildred so strongly that it could virtually be cut in a 20-minute single theme which expresses her warlike state of mind as well as her motherly hopes and emotions. How did you work on the two main themes – or the two-sided theme, depending on the point of view?

There is something interesting with these themes: you can recognize them on screen because of Mildred’s outfit. One of the themes plays when she’s at war, the other one when she works at the gift shop, or when she’s at home. It is something that I have noticed, and the fact that she changes clothes is of course relevant in the story because it defines her future actions. So I helped reinforce this idea, which is something that you see on screen, with the music.

The music from Todd Haynes‘s Wonderstruck depicts the characters’ quests through this atmosphere of fascination which is galvanized by the discovering of a big city. With Three Billboards, you did the opposite by building the whole atmosphere of this town and of its characters’ from the single character of Mildred. In both films, however, the place, whether it is New York or Ebbing, Missouri, is like a character. How do you translate the feeling of a place into music?

Wonderstruck and Three Billboards have a radically different approach of filming the city. They are of two different sizes, and they give two different visions of America. In Wonderstruck, Todd Haynes brings out the magic of the place with these two kids lost in New York and the cabinet of wonders. On the other hand, Three Billboards is set in a quiet and lost town where everybody seems to know each other, and what Martin brings out in the story is the drama and the horror. These two atmospheres being very different and clearly delimited, it helps me to see which field I will engage myself in.

What is your relationship to Ennio Morricone’s music? It is obviously one of your inspirations for Three Billboards.

I used to love Spaghetti Westerns when I was younger, and the music from these movies was something that really attracted me. Morricone has done many orchestral, complex pieces later in his career, but at the time when I did my early film scores like Raising Arizona, I have found an inspiration in the music he wrote for Sergio Leone’s westerns, when he was about the same age as I was at the time. He did great things with very little, and as a young composer with no money, I obviously drew my inspirations from it.

This very strong bound between the music and the main character made me think of your score for Psycho III. Norman Bates and Mildred Hayes are both simple characters that are somehow haunted, whether it is literally or figuratively, by death and horror. I would say that Psycho III was the matrix to all of your work, although it might seem strange today. With this film, you expressed with music all the themes that would come in your career as a film composer.

Thank you, I didn’t think about that. Actually, I would rather look at my future possibilities than looking back at my work. The truth is, I only sticked to the character of Mildred when I composed the music for Three Billboards.

There is another character that shares some similarities with Mildred Hayes: it’s Mildred Pierce, the character from James Cain’s novel. Apart from having the same first name, they are both divorced in a time or a place where people usually don’t get divorces, and they both are strong female characters who try to hide their weaknesses behind a masculine temper. In Three Billboards and in Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce, which you scored, some of the cues are quite similar, although arranged with largely different instruments.

Again, I didn’t use these similarities in the composing process and I didn’t search for inspiration in my score for Mildred Pierce. But I would add that both Mildreds are aware that they use their masculine temper – because they mostly use it when they are talking to men – and they know that it is something that would cause them trouble. They are strong women who eventually prove they should be taken seriously in a man’s world, so I guess that is how I put it in music.

The licensed music in the film sounds always right and reflects itself perfectly into your compositions. Did you intervene in any way on the choices for the licensed music?

I had very little to do with those choices, actually. They were not indicated in the script… You know, sometimes the Coens indicate a song they want to use, and they write it down in the script. It was the case for Inside Llewyn Davis or The Big Lebowski. I composed the music for the latter being aware of the presence in the film of the songs they had chosen. This was not the case for Three Billboards, I don’t think the licensed music was already in when I started working on the film.

The Coen brothers are currently at the end of the editing phase. Actually, I haven’t written any music yet, but we discussed it a lot. The series will tell six distinct stories set in the Far West, each of them in a different genre, so we were thinking of having different music for each chapter. But now, we know that the series will be recut and released as a film, so the music will probably have to be more harmonised. But like I said before, nothing is written yet, so this is all I can say at the moment.

The soundtrack for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri has already set high standards for the 2018 film scores, so we should expect all the awaited films and all the unexpected gems scheduled for this year to stick to these brilliant standards. With this score, American composer Carter Burwell brings us back to the blessed times of film soundtracks, when Ennio Morricone was the world’s busiest – and most acclaimed – composer and one of the most interesting experimenters in film music. Martin McDonagh’s outstanding latest work examines the crossed destinies of small-town inhabitants when one of them goes to war with the police, and more particularly targets the town’s well-liked sheriff. Inherently, Burwell’s pieces sound like a folk opera. Frances McDormand, pretty much like Claudia Cardinale in Sergio Leone’s masterpiece Once Upon A Time in the West, is the main motivation to the film’s musical dimension. Burwell shows Mildred’s state of mind, her hopes and despair; while her relentless quest for justice grows stronger, the score goes along with her and offers variations on the main themes, sometimes emphasizing her warlike behaviour and sometimes being much more intimate and closer to Mildred, the afflicted mother. Though Carter Burwell is far from being a stranger when it comes to black humour, his score for Three Billboards is devoid of irony as it perfectly catches the film’s dramatic dimension that results from the main character’s loss and her consequent inner moral conflict. The shortness of the score (approximatively 20 minutes overall) brings out its Morriconesque intensity and violence, making it one of the most powerful and saddest soundtracks of his career.

Carter Burwell’s sensibility for composing for images is something that transpired very early: a Harvard graduate, Burwell studied both animation and electronic music, and directed a short animated film while teaching at the Harvard Electronic Music Studio. He pursued these two parallel careers throughout the 1980s, working as an animator for computer-animated films as well as composing for theatre, dance and film. In 1983, while he was in the avant-garde pop group Thick Pigeon with no previous experience in the field of film score composition, he met Joel and Ethan Coen, who were looking for someone to compose the score for their first feature film Blood Simple, which they were editing. Although he never planned to pursue a career in film scoring, the year after the release of Blood Simple he was approached by Anthony Perkins, who was directing his first film ever, the third installment of the Psycho franchise. As a big fan of Perkins’ and intrigued by his ideas for the film, which he promised would be radically different from Hitchcock’s classic and its 80s slasher sequel, Burwell accepted the challenge and delivered a thrilling electronic score. Unlike Jerry Goldsmith whose score for Psycho II mainly relies on the atmosphere and on the cues written by Bernard Hermann for Hitch, Burwell takes a complete opposite approach in the Psycho III soundtrack: he mixes the instrumental themes from his Synclavier with eerie, quirky electronic sounds which, rather than trying to make Norman Bates look likeable, penetrate the bipolar disorder he suffers from and translate his split personality into music. The offbeat music from Psycho III – including pop-punk songs performed with Thick Pigeon* – and the composer’s ability to entangle the film’s dark atmosphere with the character’s complexity would be the matrix for his future career that would continue to soar from his next film (Raising Arizona) onwards.

The name of Carter Burwell is of course associated first and foremost with the Coen Brothers, as he scored fifteen out of their seventeen feature films. The Coens’ cynical storytelling and their unusual characters are Burwell’s experimenting playground for dissonant, grim and (unconventionally) non-orchestral scores that often embrace the genres deconstructed by the directors. Undoubtedly, his most compelling work for them and probably the purest expression of their collaboration is the beautifully quiet, yet melancholic score for Fargo, that never hints at the comedic side of this two-time-Oscar-winning noir-ish drama. Examples of the composer’s sound and musical experimentations are legion in the Coens’ filmography, from the nearly absent soundtracks in Barton Fink and No Country for Old Men (where the mystery is reinforced by the omnipresence of sound design which serves as music) to the haunting pieces from A Serious Man, Miller’s Crossing and True Grit. Although the cinematic world of the Coens is often reminiscent of the classic Western era, the musical works from Carter Burwell play with this all-American environment rather than frankly embrace the genre: it is the case with Raising Arizona in which the score is dominated by crazy banjos that enhance the combination of adventure and comedy.

The association between the Coen Brothers and Carter Burwell rapidly aroused the interest from other talented directors such as Todd Haynes and Spike Jonze, for whom he scored several films. It is important to notice that both directors, beyond their strongly independent status, share a bound with music as strong as Burwell’s bound with cinema: Jonze has been one of the most-respected videoclip directors since the 1990s and Haynes’s films often deal with contemporary music. The consequence is that both of them offered Burwell the opportunity to compose his most compellingly weird, dark but always emotional scores: Being John Malkovich, Carol, Adaptation and Where the Wild Things Are. As it was the case with the Coens, Burwell’s scores for them deal with love, friendship, childhood, family and self-questioning journeys with a completely unexpected approach. While still blurring the line between the intimate bubble and the self-questioning aspects of his music, Carter Burwell’s pieces bloom into the characters, giving them just the space they need to become poetical subjects. His recent score for Wonderstruck, directed by Haynes, is an ode to the kids’ innocence, their hopes, their fears and feelings as they embark on a personal, magical journey to New York – the composer’s birthplace – that changes their lives.

Carter Burwell’s unusual style led him to write and compose music for unusual films. In the historical drama Rob Roy, the score remarkably stays away from the blockbuster clichés and subtly blends with the traditional Scottish music that complements, with an unusual softness, the haunting themes composed by Burwell (with the participation of the Scottish band Capercaillie). The same year, in a totally different manner, James Horner‘s score for Braveheartbrought an overwhelming splendour to Mel Gibson’s 13th Century epic. In 1997, Burwell composed the ominous soundtrack to Mathieu Kassovitz’s crime drama Assassin(s), in which silence is an important factor to the uneasiness brought by the film’s ultra-violence – he is thanked in the end credits for bringing “the right notes at the right time.” The pieces are very short, dark and they are never used to underscore the violent and disturbing sequences. More recently, the composer wrote the heartrending themes for three of the five Twilight films and started an important collaboration with director Martin McDonagh: his three pitch-black comedies In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri are magnified by counterpointing scores that express the fragility of the characters.

Nearly thirty-five years after his first compositions for film, Carter Burwell is one of the most respected composers in the world of film scoring but he does not hesitate to take risky paths and to commit to alternative and unconventional projects. He is currently working with the Coen Brothers for their upcoming Netflix series The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which will tell six different tales set in the Far West.

Written by Valentin Maniglia and edited by Marine Wong Kwok Chuen

* At one point, Burwell worked with a then debuting composer, Danny Elfman, to write a song that would use a sample of the famous Bernard Hermann strings from Psycho, but things did not work out. Thirteen years later, Elfman scored the remake of the Hitchcock classic by Gus Van Sant, using the same samples.

]]>http://magazine.scoreit.org/carter-burwell-portrait/feed/01734Why the 2018 Oscar Nominees Have Set a New Milestone in the History of Film Musichttp://magazine.scoreit.org/2018-oscar-nominees-set-new-milestone-history-film-music/
http://magazine.scoreit.org/2018-oscar-nominees-set-new-milestone-history-film-music/#respondFri, 26 Jan 2018 18:02:09 +0000http://magazine.scoreit.org/?p=1724The 90th Academy Awards ceremony will be held on March 4th, 2018, and features five nominees in the Best Original Score category. While the Academy promised more diversity in their nominations after last year’s #OscarsSoWhite and this year’s #MeToo – remember Natalie Portman presenting the “all-male nominees” at the 2018 Golden Globes – it must […]

]]>The 90th Academy Awards ceremony will be held on March 4th, 2018, and features five nominees in the Best Original Score category. While the Academy promised more diversity in their nominations after last year’s #OscarsSoWhite and this year’s #MeToo – remember Natalie Portman presenting the “all-male nominees” at the 2018 Golden Globes – it must be acknowledged that despite the noticeable efforts, the Oscar Board still has a long way to go before reaching parity. The truth is, the Best Original Score category offers almost no surprises at first sight with some of the best-known Oscars “regulars”: Hans Zimmer (ten nominations, one win), Alexandre Desplat (nine nominations, one win), John Williams (fifty-one nominations, five wins) and Carter Burwell (two nominations). Jonny Greenwood is the one who creates the surprise with his first-ever Oscar nomination, and anyone who has ever listened to his scores for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, The Master and Inherent Vice would agree that it was about time. And despite an all-white, all-male shortlist, these five are currently setting a new standard for the future of film scores.

John Williams at the 55th Academy Awards ceremony (1983). That year, Williams won his fourth Oscar for Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (1982).

Ambition. This word alone should summarize this year’s Oscar race for Best Original Score, and although the five composers have nothing left to prove, all of them did bring out the best of what lies beyond their comfort zone. By composing spectacular new material into which he injects a revisiting of some of the unforgettable themes from Star Wars – even including the unexpected ‘Cantina Band’ – 85-year-old film score legend John Williams achieves what might be the most compelling score he has ever written. Its epic orchestrations and its unique use of motifs – among which the repeating and outstanding reuse of familiar cues – put the emphasis on melodies driven by Wagnerian arrangements for strings and horns, all of this in a pure Classical Hollywood style. Rian Johnson’s film actually seems to work as a playground for Williams’s art: besides the remarkable work done by the composer, The Last Jedi’s score is the expression of all the fun Williams had while writing it, as well as its ability to whisper double meanings in some of the scenes can prove, not to mention how large is the part of the amusement generated by the film’s music. After a 60-year career in film and some of the most memorable themes in the history of Hollywood, John Williams has not said everything yet, and although his recent work on Steven Spielberg’s The Post might be one of the most beautifully unexpected works he has done in the last twenty years – after Catch Me If You Can and its unprecedented sax solos, that is – he couldn’t find any language more universal than the music from a Star Wars film to demonstrate that he still is at the top of his game, and rather than a party-crashing honorary nominee, he is a very serious Oscar contender for this year.

Far, far away from the Star Wars’ self-reinventing soundtrack, one of last year’s most surprising film scores was Hans Zimmer’s Dunkirk, which he performed with his two most talented disciples, Lorne Balfe and Benjamin Wallfisch. Christopher Nolan’s World War II motion picture is brought to another level of intensity with this score, so much that Zimmer should actually be credited as a co-director for the film. Zimmer’s fascination for blurring the boundaries of time and space reaches its ultimate peak with Dunkirk, in which music and sound design are merged together. The composer distilled his musical obsessions in all his film scores for Nolan since The Dark Knight; here, he synthesizes them all and cranks it up a notch with the music shaping the film itself and its characters’ destinies. At some point, it is even impossible to distinguish Zimmer’s frantic music from the sound effects. The omnipresence of the music throughout the whole duration of the film is quite a singular and experimental tour de force which gives an all new definition of cinematic rhythm. On the other hand, the soundtrack album – which should definitely be played loud – allows the listener to free himself from the film’s heavy imagery, as the musical experience is as powerful as the film is. Zimmer is one of the masters of electronic music composition and programming, and this overwhelming, dark and aggressive experience is beautifully softened at the end of the album, where Zimmer plays with Edward Elgar’s typically British variation ‘Nimrod’, here deconstructed in a bright and warm string-driven track that reminds of another immersive WWII film scored by Zimmer, Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.

Fresh off Golden Globes win, Alexandre Desplat is going for a ‘grand slam’ after his BAFTA nomination. The Shape of Water marks the first collaboration between Desplat and director Guillermo Del Toro, a singular case in the recent history of the Oscar nominations for Best original Score – the two most recent exceptions being Steven Price’s score for Gravity and Ennio Morricone’s score for The Hateful Eight, both Oscar winners in the end. Desplat’s score draws its force from its multitude of melodies that are as short as they are colorful, with three main themes that mould the whole soundtrack progressively. With this score, the composer actually tries to shape the sound of water with a wonderful flute section, a piano and his own whistle; the movements are light, the rhythm is airy and you actually go with Desplat’s flow though the twenty-track and 55-minute compositions, with some brief – but nonetheless thrilling – action parts talentedly performed, with amusing winks here and there to some of the most famous John Williams’s works. The French composer reached the heart of Del Toro’s cinematic emotions and visual poetry like no composer did before him – except, perhaps, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth composer Javier Navarrete – and shows how determined he is today to do nothing but great work.

If Carter Burwell lost the Golden Globe for Best Score to Desplat, his compositions for Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri are to listen to carefully. The historical composer for the Coen brothers and Todd Haynes collaborates for the third time with the Irish director for this film, which is also the third contender, after The Shape of Water and Dunkirk, to receive the biggest number of Academy Award nominations this year. It’s enough to make it a serious contender, but there’s so much more than that in Carter Burwell’s score. His Morricone-influenced themes perfectly embrace Frances McDormand’s search for justice and vengeance, and together with McDonagh’s script, Burwell’s score builds a certain idea of America: a land of despair, violence, sadness and contradictions. The score for Three Billboards does not neglect to unveil hints of hope in its darkest compositions, but, much like the film, it is overall a current musical witness of what the myth of America has become, speaking out through notes in the most American music genre.

On the opposite spectrum of Martin McDonagh’s hot-headed characters and Carter Burwell’s shady score is Jonny Greenwood’s fifth solo collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson – apart from directing three videoclips for Radiohead’s latest album A Moon Shaped Pool, the director had his four latest films scores by Greenwood and he followed the guitarist to Rajasthan when he recorded his 2015 album Junun, coming back from their musical journey with a 55-minute documentary about the recording sessions and the first live performance of the album. Entirely composed while touring with Radiohead, Greenwood’s score for Phantom Thread is without any doubt the most beautiful expression of romanticism achieved in music in a very long time. For more than ten years now, Greenwood proves that he’s not only one of the most talented guitarists in the world, but also an outstanding composer and arranger, and it’s never been so true until today. Phantom Thread is his most impressive score ever, but also the riskiest: for the recording sessions, Greenwood worked with a 60-piece string orchestra, taking advantage of this massive gathering of musicians to bring out sounds that are much more than music. The Phantom Thread soundtrack is pure emotion in a classical way, and just like the character played by Daniel Day Lewis in the film, obsessional dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock, it is the perfect representation of elegance and excellence.

Score It Magazine compiled some of the highlights from this year’s nominated scores. Listen to our 17-track playlist here:

]]>http://magazine.scoreit.org/2018-oscar-nominees-set-new-milestone-history-film-music/feed/01724Oh, high marks to Dave Porter – Scoring James Franco’s The Disaster Artisthttp://magazine.scoreit.org/oh-high-marks-dave-porter-scoring-james-francos-disaster-artist/
http://magazine.scoreit.org/oh-high-marks-dave-porter-scoring-james-francos-disaster-artist/#respondWed, 10 Jan 2018 17:50:36 +0000http://magazine.scoreit.org/?p=1695An L.A.-based composer, Dave Porter is best known for having scored all 62 episodes of AMC’s Breaking Bad. He attended Sarah Lawrence College, where he studied classical and electronic music composition, before starting his professional career in The Looking Glass Studios, the New York recording studios of Philip Glass. He left New York in the […]

]]>An L.A.-based composer, Dave Porter is best known for having scored all 62 episodes of AMC’s Breaking Bad. He attended Sarah Lawrence College, where he studied classical and electronic music composition, before starting his professional career in The Looking Glass Studios, the New York recording studios of Philip Glass. He left New York in the early 2000s, in what he calls a “post-9/11 exodus” and moved to Los Angeles. His early works include additional music for the sci-fi/action film Ultraviolet, starring Milla Jovovich, and Chris Bell’s documentary Bigger Stronger Faster. His encounter with the Breaking Bad creator, showrunner, writer and director Vince Gilligan marked the birth of one of the most wonderful and complex scores ever written for a TV series, defining Dave Porter’s own style, blurring lines between traditional score composition and sound design. Breaking Bad’s iconic theme, nervous pieces, muffled percussions and traditional instruments created an atmosphere quite unique in the world of TV series, since the music played a part as important as the main characters did.

Besides having teamed up once again with Gilligan for the Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul, Porter’s credits as a TV series composer currently include NBC’s The Blacklist and AMC’s Preacher. The Disaster Artist is Porter’s fourth original score for a fiction feature film.

Based on the nonfiction novel of the same name written by actor Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist recounts the making of the 2003 film The Room, which gained a cult status by being known as “the Citizen Kane of bad films”. Directed by James Franco, The Disaster Artist is also a beautiful Hollywoodish tale of friendship between director Tommy Wiseau (James Franco) and Sestero (played by James’s brother Dave Franco), two antithetical minds who shared the same aspirations in a desperate, crazy effort to reach fame.

Score It Magazine: Firstly, how did you initially get involved in composing music for The Disaster Artist? I assume it is thanks to producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.

Dave Porter: That’s right. I was already working with them on a TV series called Preacher, which is based on a comic book that those guys loved when they were younger. They got the rights to make the television version of it and they are very involved in it, they direct some of the episodes… So I got to spend a lot of time with them working on Preacher, and during one of our meetings, I overheard them talking about what was to become The Disaster Artist, in which they are also involved as producers. Of course, I was interested by what they were talking about and I bought the book, which I knew was going to be their outline for how they were going to approach the movie. I loved the book when I read it and so I spoke with those guys, wondering if they had anyone interested for the music yet: they said they haven’t gone that far yet, but thankfully, they thought I would be a good match, and then they introduced me to their good friend and long-time collaborator James Franco. That’s how I ended up being fortunate enough to work on it.

As a matter of fact, I read Greg Sestero’s book listening to your score, and I thought it gives you the perfect mood to read it. What inspirations did you draw from it?

I’m so glad to hear that! The book really was my inspiration. I love everything about the movie, but the book is what initially got me excited about the project. Of course, like in any book, there’s so much more you can say than you can say in a 90-minute movie. There are so many amazing details they managed to put in the film, but there are even more in the book! Greg Sestero, as a person and with his book and his journey through all of this, is really fascinating. He is the moral center of the story, all of us can relate to him in some way. Through his book, he got me interested in the project and I think I always saw it through that lens. And the book is what made this story possible, I’m sure it’s also what made James excited about it too.

What amazed me in both projects was how it wasn’t much of a “making of” kind of story, but how strong it sticks to this wonderful tale of a narrow yet true friendship between these two guys with contradictory personalities, and that’s mainly what the score makes us feel. How did you work on this?

Very early on, we had a lot of discussions about what role the music should play. In my case, I thought the music should be the glue to their friendship. Not that the film didn’t tell that story, but it had to reinforce it. There’s a core friendship and also a core shared dream between these two guys that, as you pointed out, couldn’t be more different. But they had the same goals, and despite all of the obstacles thrown at them and through the ups and downs, they managed to succeed. Not in the way they initially intended it, but they did, and they’re still good friends today! And for any creative person who is brave enough to put their ideas and their creative expression out there in the world, I think anybody can relate to them.

Some pieces of the score are much more orchestral than what we’re used to hear from you, and they remind us of these overwhelmingly optimistic Hollywood film scores. Hollywood films have obviously been an inspiration for Tommy; Sunset Boulevard, although the film doesn’t even mention it, is quoted several times in the book and might be the most Hollywoodish film ever made, and the making of The Room is of course an incredible real-life Hollywood story itself. Did you take any inspirations from classic or more recent Hollywood films while composing the score?

I did, and I’m glad you picked up on that. One of the things that I really tried to achieve with the score was an earnestness and an optimism that isn’t necessarily too common now in film scores, but that used to be in Hollywood film scores decades ago. I think there is a sweetness and an innocence in both Tommy and Greg and in their friendship as well that really works. And, yes, there is no more Hollywood story than this one. This is the ultimate version of the Hollywood success story and for me, that kind of big, swelling, full and optimistic sound was something I really wanted to capture for that. I studied classical and electronic music and I know both very well, but just because of the avenues that I’ve been down and the projects that I’ve worked on, I haven’t got to do so much of that lately, so that part was exciting for me too.

What’s interesting with your music is that it goes beyond characters: in Breaking Bad, for instance, music is basically one of the main characters. It is very rich, and it is fun and complex at the same time. We can feel that in Better Call Saul and in Preacher as well: the episodes might sound very different from one another. Do you find it more relieving to write music for a film, which has to be much more uniform, or do you feel more stuck?

(Laughs) You know, there are advantages and challenges at both. The beauty of working on a television series is that you have lots of time. Not in the near term, because you have a lot of music to write and you have to turn around episodes very quickly, but in what I call “music real estate”, in other words amounts of music that you can use. To use your example, Breaking Bad is 62 hours long: that is a lot of time to develop ideas and themes to push the story forward, emotionally or evolutionally. So that “real estate” and time gives you a lot of license to experiment. On the other hand, a movie is sort of the opposite problem: in the best case scenario, and this was true for The Disaster Artist, you have more time to write the music, but the amount of available music space, of course, is much smaller. So, whatever you are going to say creatively or whatever journey you’re going to go on musically, you have to do it much more quickly and succinctly. One of the things I’ve been very lucky about in my career is that I’ve worked on a lot of different kinds of projects that keep me creatively motivated. The music from Better Call Saul is wildly different from what I’ve done on Preacher, or the balance of what I’m doing on film versus TV, these are challenges that I like to have because they keep me creatively interested.

How much time did you have to write and compose the music for the film?

All told, I think I did it in a couple of months. It wasn’t every day, because I was working on other projects, of course, but there was flexibility there: some additional shooting was happening, some final editing as well and James, of course, is a super busy guy, so I’m sure he was working on five other things at the time… (laughs) But unlike some of the TV shows like Better Call Saul or The Blacklist where I had a week for each episode, not only to compose, but also to mix and get approved and turn over to the mixing stage, for me it feels like an awful long time. The timetable is just different.

The electronic dimension of The Disaster Artist’s score is very interesting, with many motifs that can be heard in different tracks. I’ve always thought that motifs are the beating heart of electronic composition, but it’s also at the center of classical composition as well. Is it something that comes from your educational background at Sarah Lawrence?

What differentiates music and film from other art forms such as, say, a painting or a photograph is that they have that dimension of time within which they can evolve. All music has that element of change in motion. This is another thing that has always interested me, and when I was younger, I was particularly interested in the work of the New York-centered classical minimalists like Philip Glass and Steve Reich; in addition to all that classical music I’ve studied as a child, it plays a big role in how I think about creating music. And just like a scriptwriter, the evolution of a simple musical idea into something different or more complicated is what is most interesting to me about music.

The soundtrack also includes some cheesy hits from the ‘80s and the ‘90s such as Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” and Corona’s “The Rhythm of the Night”. Were these songs originally intended to be in the film or did you work with the music supervisor and James Franco to give them their own space?

I wasn’t really too involved in the licensed music, I mostly stayed out of this arena and left this to the music supervisor, who in this case was a very talented guy named Gabe Hilfer. Actually, he’d be the better person to ask about the songs, but I would say that I know that James had some songs that he was very eager to use and I’m sure Gabe had some great suggestions as well. The very important role of that music is to establish the time period of the film when they were making The Room, which is the late ‘90s. That is something the score doesn’t offer: I designed the score to be more modern but could take place any time. So the licensed music pens it down to a very specific time, and also carry an overoptimism in them as well, which adds to our push to encapsulate that honesty and that dream that they’re trying to achieve.

You have a very particular style, blurring the lines between film music and sound design. We can feel that in Breaking Bad. The music in the 2nd half of the film reminded me, in some ways, of the Eric Clapton & Michael Kamen score for Lethal Weapon…

Oh, that’s interesting! I’m not familiar with it, but I’m definitely going to go listen to that, sounds exciting! Actually, I didn’t reference anything particularly when I was working on this project, but I would say this score is much more orchestral-leaning than some of the things that I’ve done before on TV. There’s always going to be some elements for me of computer design or synthesizers in everything I do. There’s always going to be a mix of the two, the question is just going to be: where does the balance lie? Obviously, for The Disaster Artist, it leans more towards the orchestral construction and a lot of guitar work as well. This was the main process, but there were plenty of opportunities for me to sneak in those little pulses feelings of electronic urgency and all the tools that I love to use as well underneath.

What are your upcoming projects in film?

Well, as you might expect, nothing that I can talk about. (laughs) But I so much enjoyed the process of working on The Disaster Artist that I hope having a nice balance, as I explained before, working on film and television. It’s a funny thing, if you’d asked me when I was a kid, I would have told you that I would like to do only films. Films were the pinnacle of writing music for pictures, but I’m not sure that is still the case, and I feel so blessed to work on such great television – television that is frankly the envy of a lot of movies. So I think that for my generation of composers, it’s not so much about which media you’re in than it’s about being fortunate enough to work with the best talents and following them on the best projects. I’m going to be searching those out wherever they are, but I think for me, ultimately, it’s going to be a mixture of television and film.

]]>http://magazine.scoreit.org/oh-high-marks-dave-porter-scoring-james-francos-disaster-artist/feed/01695Score Picks from Gareth Cokerhttp://magazine.scoreit.org/score-picks-gareth-coker/
http://magazine.scoreit.org/score-picks-gareth-coker/#respondMon, 08 Jan 2018 18:03:15 +0000http://magazine.scoreit.org/?p=1710We have asked our interviewees to select five tracks from various scores that they think are interesting, forward-thinking or even underrated. There are no limits to which tracks our interviewees can choose; the aim is to give you, readers, a real glimpse into the composer’s tastes and musical identity. Last month, Gareth Coker gave us an interesting insight at his career and talked about […]

]]>We have asked our interviewees to select five tracks from various scores that they think are interesting, forward-thinking or even underrated. There are no limits to which tracks our interviewees can choose; the aim is to give you, readers, a real glimpse into the composer’s tastes and musical identity.

Last month, Gareth Coker gave us an interesting insight at his career and talked about the process of composing music for the successful survival video game ARK: Survival Evolved. Young, talented and enclined to experimentation, Gareth Coker has chosen for us five great tracks from his favourite scores which reflect the versatility of his music; those range from timeless, widely renowned orchestral pieces to much more experimental and modern tracks.

It’s the track that started it all for me, though I don’t think I knew it at the time, aged 9. This was the first piece of sheet music I remember asking my parents to buy for me. I was too young at the time to understand most of the themes in Forrest Gump, but somehow the film made an impact on me and still does. The cue itself is an example of music being able to say a lot without having to do much at all and is a great example of melody writing. A theme that uses contour, shape, repetition, rounded off with beautiful orchestration makes it instantly recognizable to anyone that hears it. Years later I realize now that the melodically-driven scores of the late ‘80s and ‘90s – which weren’t always the most subtle – have influenced me greatly. I like when the music guides you to the place that you need to go emotionally. The moment in E.T. when the bike rides into the air, the audience is ready to ‘feel’ at that point, and the music takes you across the finish line. This piece, even though it’s the opening title and not a ‘finish line’, it immediately takes you to the emotional core of where you need to be for the rest of the film. When I like a track, there’s a tendency to over-listen and get tired of hearing it, the main theme for Forrest Gump is not one of those. It’s timeless.

Inception blew my mind at the cinema, and this music track blew my mind when I heard it. I rarely do this, but I’d heard rumblings amongst the music community that Inception was going to be a groundbreaking score, so I listened to the soundtrack before seeing the movie. While my Forrest Gump choice was all about melody, this is all about aesthetic. I’d simply not heard anything like this before, and the film was also like nothing I’d seen before. A decade prior we’d had The Matrix, and I think Inception is a landmark film for action. I’ve always loved ‘big sound’ and this track is one of the prime examples of that. The score is also a landmark. We know this, because it has been imitated so many times, but never equaled, and it may never be.

Bioshock is one of my favorite game series ever, and this is where it starts. The opening sequence is so well developed and with the music, you really feel like you are entering another world. Garry Schyman and Irrational Games created a soundtrack that sounds like absolutely nothing else out there, and this remains right to the end of the third game, Bioshock Infinite.

This film was simply made for someone with Tom Holkenborg’s unique skillset to score. One of the best compliments I can give a film or a game is if I can’t imagine any other music in its place. A lot of people might dismiss Mad Max’s score as a percussion-heavy score with some synth bass, and while in parts that might be true, it’s the attitude and performance of the music that makes it stand out and feel unique. The strings are ‘just’ playing a descending chromatic line that is used as a motif throughout the film, but it’s simply the way they are played, it’s totally wild, just like the film, wild and exhilarating from start to finish, with flourishes of emotion that take you by surprise. It’s a crime that this score was not even nominated for an Oscar.

This sort of ties in with my first choice, strong melody and emotion and ‘setting the scene’, but the big difference here is the orchestration, which is clearly inspired by Ravel and other composers from the late Romantic and Impressionist era in music. The harmony is also extremely rich, making extensive use of seventh and ninth chords. I’ve noticed this is a trend in both Japanese film and game music, and combined with the lush orchestration, there is such a richness and depth of sound to the Ghbili scores, but tinged with that simplicity and accessibility of the tunes they hold within. I was quite a latecomer to most of the Japanese animations, but they obviously were impossible to avoid while I was living in Japan. Like the music of Hollywood from the ‘80s and ‘90s, they are not always the most subtle, but you don’t need subtlety when the music itself just feels so right!

]]>http://magazine.scoreit.org/score-picks-gareth-coker/feed/01710Dinosaurs, Orchestras and Indian Flutes – An Interview with Video Game Composer Gareth Cokerhttp://magazine.scoreit.org/dinosaurs-orchestras-indian-flutes-interview-video-game-composer-gareth-coker/
http://magazine.scoreit.org/dinosaurs-orchestras-indian-flutes-interview-video-game-composer-gareth-coker/#respondWed, 20 Dec 2017 18:51:19 +0000http://magazine.scoreit.org/?p=1703Gareth Coker is one of the most acclaimed music composers for video games. Since the release of the platform game Ori and the Blind Forest in 2015, one of the highest-rated games on Xbox One, he was awarded several presigious awards such as the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences award for Outstanding Music Composition, and […]

]]>Gareth Coker is one of the most acclaimed music composers for video games. Since the release of the platform game Ori and the Blind Forest in 2015, one of the highest-rated games on Xbox One, he was awarded several presigious awards such as the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences award for Outstanding Music Composition, and a recognition as an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music for his contribution to the music profession.

Gareth Coker’s sound is made of beautiful, memorable melodies combined with imposing atmospheres that completely enhance the sound and narrative dimensions of the games he composes for. His other credits in video game scoring include Primal Carnage, the Greek Mythology, Chinese Mythology and Norse Mythology editions of Minecraft, as well as several short films, documentaries and ads. This year, he released the soundtrack for the survival game ARK: Survival Evolved, and is currently working on the sequel to Ori and the Blind Forest, entitled Ori and the Will of Wisps.

Gareth Coker at Abbey Road Studios. Photography by Benjamin Ealovega

Score It Magazine: First of all, could you please tell us more about your musical background, your inspirations, and how you became a composer for films, video games and different other media?

I’m classically trained, started playing piano at the age of 8 and then unintentionally ended up composing during my time improvising in school jazz bands, which led to the desire to create. I went to the Royal Academy of Music, then taught English in Japan for 3 years. This afforded me the opportunity to travel and to live and work in a completely different environment. The Japan chapter is a very important period of my life, as my time there influences my everyday approach to my work and how I deal with other people, as well as all the obvious cultural and artistic benefits of being surrounded by global influences! After Japan, I went back to school at the University of Southern California to continue my composition training. After graduating, it was then off into the wilderness and the trenches as is often the case with new creatives, working on various projects… And then one day, an email ended up in my inbox.

I read that you arrived on Ori and The Blind Forest very early on. How did you get on board?

The director of the game, Thomas Mahler, found me on ModDB.com. He emailed me because he liked one of my tracks. He said he had a prototype in development and that he would like me to take a look at it. I did, and being a gamer myself, I immediately identified that this prototype was very promising. Thomas said that if I composed the prototype for free and if the pitch to publishers was successful, I would score the game. Microsoft offered Thomas and Moon Studios the best deal, and the rest is history!

I imagine that you started working with visuals, preliminary artworks. How did you proceed with the creation of the music for the game? How much direction were you given, did the music you wrote change as the developers worked on the game?

The only direction I was given was, ‘Make it work!’. This is both creatively freeing and also a little daunting. One of the advantages of getting on board early, however, is that you can really get a feel for the game and start to establish all the little things that make an effective score tick. Tempo for me is a very important factor in effective game music. Ori is a game about movement (platforming) and thus finding the right tempo to match Ori’s speed was one of the first things I did. Beyond that, I am at my best when I have the visuals, as I think a very important part of the job is choosing the right instruments to sync with the visuals. The glue that ties all this together of course is the theme (or themes) that can be played across different areas with different instruments, but still keeping things familiar.

Can you tell us more about Aeralie Brighton, the vocalist whose ethereal voice we hear on Ori?

I found Aeralie on YouTube. And then after messaging her, discovered that she lived 10 minutes away from my house! We met up, did a test recording, and it was clear that her voice had a tone that would become a very important part of the score. It’s not a surprise to me that the most popular tracks on the soundtrack are those with her voice in it, such as ‘Light of Nibel’.

The music often echoes what we see on-screen. I’m thinking about the wooden percussion during the Ginso Tree sequence, we have pipes which evoke the wind when Ori travels through the skies, etc. How did you get the idea?

Honestly, it seemed like the most obvious solution to me at the time! It’s very easy to overthink things when writing music and sometimes the solution can be staring you right in the face. It just simply made the most sense to have wooden instruments being inside a tree. As for the wind/glide segment of the game, I hired an amazing flautist, Rachel Mellis, to play the Indian flute called ‘bansuri’ – which has a very unique sound that lent itself well to the gameplay.

The Misty Woods is slightly different in that I don’t have a special instrument for the area, however I do use a whole-tone scale. The unique characteristic of the whole-tone scale is that it is impossible to resolve the harmony, thus it feels like it is never-ending. Given that you are supposed to be lost in the Misty Woods – this seemed like the most appropriate compositional device to use!

When visuals, music, gameplay and design all come together, it makes it very hard to break the immersion. Music that doesn’t match the visuals can break the zone for the player, so on the music side I worked very hard to ensure that the tone of the music matched what the player saw on screen.

Someone might say, “But no combat music plays while the player is fighting enemies, how does that match what’s on screen?!” Well, if you look a little more closely, combat music in the game only plays when you have to vanquish an enemy. Most players of course will try to take out every monster because they give Spirit Light (experience points), but I felt that it wasn’t necessary to bludgeon the player with combat music in this case, because vanquishing monsters is not essential to progress the story. This concept becomes more fully realized further in the game once you get the ‘Bash’ ability and combine it with ‘Glide’ – you can quite easily avoid combat with the vast majority of enemies in the game. So, this is the one exception to the general rule, but in terms of the base aesthetic, you’ll always find that the music aesthetic matches the visual aesthetic.

There is a sequel in development, Ori and the Will of the Wisps. How are you going to tackle it (if you’re not already working on it)? Will you re-use some of the themes you created?

I can’t go into this too much for obvious reasons, but if you look at the trailer that we showed at E3, it re-uses three themes from the original game (‘The Sacrifice’, ‘Ori Lost in the Storm’, and ‘Light of Nibel’). The game is another title about Ori, so it would make sense to bring back Ori’s theme. As for new material, well, it’s pretty clear from the trailer that the owlet will have some part to play in the story.

I’m looking forward to revisiting the world, and fusing what I think people liked about the original score, but take it to a new place that fits the story we’re trying to tell and the world we’re trying to create.

For your recently released score to the video game ARK: Survival Evolved, I read that you used a 93-piece Philharmonia Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios. How did you find working with such an ensemble?

This ensemble was far bigger than any that I’d worked with before, so first of all, it was a real test of everything that I’d learned and experienced to this point. I’m very fortunate that I have an excellent core team alongside me. My conductor, Alexander Rudd, has conducted all my scores for me since we first met at the USC. The role of a conductor at a recording session is very demanding. It’s a mix of communication/trouble-shooting, and being able to keep a large number of people – the players – engaged. Alex is brilliant at all three, which allows me to focus only on what I’m hearing being performed. Then, Zach Lemmon is my second pair of ears in the booth and a general multi-tasker; he has an amazing ability to spot potential issues before they might happen, and also offer suggestions that I might not have considered, and that are easy to implement. Zach also studied with me at USC. Between the three of us, we’ve now got a wealth of experience and that makes working with such an ensemble much easier – even though we feel like we learn something new every time! 93 players and recording around 150 minutes of music in 3 days is a gargantuan task but we somehow pulled it off.

The Philharmonia Orchestra were a joy to work with. Any nerves I had were completely assuaged after the first take of the main theme, which was the first piece we recorded. Everything was smooth from start to finish on what was likely quite a physically demanding score for them to play, given the amount of action music.

What drew you to ARK: Survival Evolved? Can you tell us a bit about your composition process on this project?

I was brought on a few months before their Early Access release. The first assignment given to me was to come up with a main theme. Looking at the scope of the game, which combines the survival genre with building and of course, the dinosaurs, it was clear I was going to get to write something huge and epic – which for the most part was quite different from Ori, which I had just finished.

It was extremely fortunate that the very first version of my main theme was what you hear in the game now. I think it ticked several boxes for Studio Wildcard, who had essentially given me an open brief and also said that they didn’t want it to sound like John Williams’ Jurassic Park. It was important for them to have a recognizable main theme and to help evoke a sense of adventure with an element of strife and survival.

Most of the music was born from this main theme; you’ll hear a version of the theme in several of the combat cues. The combat cues represent each environment in the game (jungle, beach, mountain, desert, etc.) and there are light/heavy versions for each, and also a version for day and night. The end-game of ARK takes a science-fiction twist so it allows me to introduce a lot more synthesized elements. Forgive the pun, but the score definitely ‘evolves’ as you progress through the game!

How does this project differ to other scores you have created in the past?

The main difference is that this game was in Early Access, which is a game that is in open development, whereby the public can play the game in its alpha and beta stages. They buy the game with the disclaimer that the game is unfinished. This affects music in a couple of ways: 1) virtual mockups of your music will be heard by the audience, even if the music is going to be recorded live, and 2) the nature of Early Access and the audience having early access to music, means that you have to consider how you develop and change the music.

I’ll expand a little bit on the 2nd point. When we started the game in Early Access, there was only one piece of combat music for day, and one piece of combat music for night, regardless of the environment you were in. This was back in June 2015. The next combat music update did not take place until February 2017. By this time, ARK had a huge audience, at least 6 million players, and a concurrent user count on PC that was consistently in the Top 10 on Steam. Players had become used to the way the music worked and the music cues that played in the June 2015 version of the game. When we changed things in February 2017, it changed the way combat music played in the game because we introduced all the environmental themes. This took a period of adjustment from the community and there are, still to this day, people who would prefer to use the original mocked up music even though the general consensus is that the final Abbey Road versions are what people enjoy! When players put so many hours into a game, they get used to – and attached to – what they hear. We see this in other games too. For example, Minecraft is changing its textures in consistency and look, and while objectively it’s better, there’s a nostalgia element to the original textures, so I imagine there will be a period of adjustment. The same applies to remasters. Remasters don’t always turn out better, they are different, and probably great for a new audience, but for the original audience, there is the potential for the ‘feel’ of the original not to be captured.

To summarize, in film scoring, there can be ‘temp’ love when a director gets attached to a piece. In Early Access game scoring, we essentially have a case not of temp love, but ‘mock-up love’ (or early version love). I’m doing a talk at the Game Developers Conference which will act as a post-mortem on this, and steps composers can take to solve the unique challenges and issues that come up in Early Access scoring.

You’ve worked on a lot of other non-gaming projects too. How does working on a game compare to working on other sorts of media?

Obviously the main difference is linear storytelling versus non-linear storytelling, but also the way a game is made can be very freeform compared to a film or TV show which generally has a set schedule. Games can ‘reshoot’ at any point, so you can constantly tweak in quite a major way. Whereas in films, once your footage is shot, that’s what you have to work with. Finally, the scope of games can be much greater. We have games that last a huge length of time, hundreds of hours. Ori and the Blind Forest is considered a ‘shorter’ game and it takes the average player 10-12 hours to finish! So, simply put, you get to write a lot more music!

Do you think video game soundtracks as a whole are more popular now than they were a decade ago?

I think they’ve always been popular, but now they are getting increased visibility because gaming is more popular than ever before. Also, the quality of game scores is easily matching film and television, and there are no limitations anymore. So there is no excuse for a lack of quality in terms of production anymore, and as a result, there is little to differentiate a game score from a film/TV score in terms of production quality. This is illustrated by the huge number of game concerts that are popping up all over the globe. Radio stations such as the UK’s Classic FM have a dedicated show to video game music and this introduces the world of games to a different audience as well as giving a platform for game music to be heard on radio. Game soundtracks do quite well in terms of sales and regularly feature in the top 10 on iTunes and sometimes the Billboard charts too.

I firmly believe that we are still 5-10 years away from gaming reaching anything like its peak, its ‘golden era’. We are still using, and technology is evolving all the time. So while things may seem popular now, we still have a way to go, and that’s extremely exciting.

What can you tell us about your upcoming projects?

There’s one more ARK expansion to work on in addition to the two that I’ve already composed (Scorched Earth and Aberration). I’m very fortunate that the team at 4JStudios and Minecraft keep asking me back to write more music for them so I expect there may be something in 2018 too. However, the vast majority of my attention next year will be devoted to scoring Ori and the Will of the Wisps.